Thursday, February 18, 2010

I've opted to sit out the latest round (summed up here, via) of 'who're you calling anti-Semitic, beeyatch,' basically because I feel I've already said all I have to say on the topic of why it's impossible to use the term 'anti-Semitism' in reference to anyone other than Hitler himself without being accused of hysterical paranoia. One cannot properly refer to anyone pre-1880s as anti-Semitic, because that didn't exist then, even if it basically did, because of questions of anachronistic terminology. This much makes sense, academically at least. But then we're to believe there haven't been any anti-Semites since World War II, because once we established that Hitler Wuz Mean, Jews today are the leaders of gosh-darn-everything, and are basically like white people, privilege-wise, but more so. Rather than defining anti-Semitism as hatred of Jews, we've so thoroughly equated it with that-which-manifests-itself-as-an-otherwise-respectable-Western-country-going-genocidal-in-the-early-1940s, so mere down-with-Jewish-influence-ism in other contexts can't be labeled anti-Semitic, because that would be going overboard. It's all just an amalgam of genuine concern about Wall Street and AIPAC, and anyone who says otherwise is one of those whiny Jews.